[Galaxy S I9000 General] eaglesteve:
I promised to follow up on the fact that death grip affects all smartphones, so here are some of what I wish to say:

a) If you want proof that death grip does affects SGS's signal in equally dramatic way compared to iPhone4, do this:

- Go to your settings/About phone/Status and look at the value of dBm under Signal strength. In my house, if I leave my SGS on the table, it would read -81dBm. Yours will have different value.

- Then pick up the phone, and death grip the bottom back of the phone, and see for yourself that it drops within seconds. In my case, it drops by 30dBm, to -111dBm. Edit: in fact no death grip is necessary to reduce SGS's signal strength by 30 dBm. You hove to merely place it on your flat palm without even the need to grip it in order to reduce the signal by that much!!! I have a video for this if anyone wants me to upload it to YouTube.

b) A change of 30dBm may or may not be an issue, depending on what you're left with. So, call may or may not drop as a result. I could only drop call in bad reception area as I have mentioned a few times.

How does this compared to iPhone 4's drop magnitute? I don't have an iPhone 4, so I will go by a report written by Anandtech to get this figure:

The difference between placing it on a table and holding it tightly covering the fatal gap area is summarised by this sentence:

"For example, at another test location, signal without holding the phone is -89 dBm, which is still displayed as 5 bars. Cup the phone, and you'll fall all the way to -113 dBm". The change in signal strength in iPhone by death grip or simply bridging the two piece of metal is 24dBm - less than in SGS. The full story of iPhone 4 Antenna test is:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

c) If you believe the media, you would have gotten an impression that as soon as your hand touches the gap between the two antenna in iPhone, signal will be cut off. However, reality is that many people had found it IMPOSSIBLE to see the change in bar where reception strength is strong like what is provided by Telstra Australia (if you believe in bar, that is. I don't, BTW). But see the following video to see that this user could touch iPhone4 in anyway he wants and not affect the bar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9mkV3nPuXk

If the reception is already bad, like with Vodafone and Optus' case in Australia, you'll see the effect, as the following videos shows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjFMhhM2_tg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJVHLOF4kLU&feature=related

To see the effects on some other phones, here are some of them:

Nokia E71

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amPG52DVQuk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1gHDa7-X0&feature=related

Nexus One

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6SpLHjcb5c&feature=related

Samsung Galaxy S

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vefQ4I2wOXs

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?deskto...d&feature=player_embedded&v=LROTHrTR92k&gl=AU

There are must too many such videos for me to list. You'll also find equally number of cases where people are not affected, dending on how they hold it.

What to make of all these? For me, I'm not really bothered. I'll simply use a case for my Samsung Galaxy S.